Peta Credlin: Renewables insanity won’t stop until lights are out

Not generating electricity from Australia’s abundance of coal and gas is an insanity that’s likely to continue until the lights start to go out, writes Peta Credlin.

If renewable power is so cheap, why do our bills keep going up and up and up?

Last week, the energy regulator confirmed a near 25 per cent rise in the Default Market Offer, the price you will pay if you don’t have any special discounts, from July 1.

This is on top of all the other hikes over the past few years.

In fact, the last time there was a decent drop in power prices was back in 2014, when the abolition of the carbon tax cut them by 9 per cent in a quarter.

On average, over the past decade, electricity prices have doubled.

And sure, the government will talk about its $3bn budget energy relief package, but that’s only for about half Australia’s households, and it’s just $500 each on average, for bills soaring towards $2000 a year.

And anyway, it’s just a taxpayer-funded money-go-round, putting money back in one pocket that government policy has already taken out of the other pocket.

The truth is that Australia had among the world’s lowest power prices, until we started stuffing around with unreliable renewables, and running our electricity system to reduce emissions rather than to produce affordable and reliable power.

And it’s only going to get worse, not better, as federal and state governments double down on this mistake.

Australia had among the world’s lowest power prices until we started stuffing around with unreliable renewables. Picture: AFP

Minister after minister insists that the solution to high power prices is to get even more renewable power into the system.

Over the past decade, renewables have gone from about 15 per cent to over 30 per cent of our power supply. So answer this for me: if they’re so cheap, why does more of them always mean prices going up, not down?

The essential problem is that solar panels and wind turbines only produce power when the sun’s shining and the wind’s blowing. Yet we need electricity 24/7, not just 30 per cent of the time.

Hence, renewables always have to be “firmed”, or backed up by power that’s available whenever you flick a switch.

Batteries which store energy from a solar power operation in Daly River, Northern Territory. Picture: AAP Image

Hence, there are two problems: first, the replacement of existing fossil-fuelled power requiring a massive capital investment; and second, quite apart from spending untold billions on new, renewable generating capacity, there still needs to be back-up power available for when the wind won’t blow and the sun can’t shine.

Even the government admits that meeting its renewable target of 82 per cent of our power from renewable sources means installing 22,000 new solar panels every day, and 40 large wind turbines every month, for the next eight years, plus building 28,000km of new transmission lines. Pre-election, the government costed this at about $80bn.

I know we get used to throwing billions around but never forget a billion dollars is $1000m dollars notwithstanding the fact that, given all the delays and cost blow-outs associated with infrastructure projects generally, this cost estimate was absurdly optimistic.

The Liddell Power Station which closed recently. Picture: Getty Images

But then there’s the vast additional infrastructure required to keep the lights on when renewables aren’t available.

Even the biggest batteries can only keep parts of the system going for perhaps half an hour. And Snowy 2.0, Malcolm Turnbull’s power panacea, can generate less power than the Eraring coal plant (that we will soon close), and even then only for about a week.

Plus its total cost with transmission lines is well north of $10bn, and with at least one tunnel-boring machine semi-permanently stuck, it won’t be ready till the end of the decade.

Likewise, the Hunter gas peaking plant, meant to partially replace the just-closed Liddell coal plant, is behind schedule and over budget.

With Liddell’s closure, wholesale power prices are trending up, as they did with the last big coal plant closure, Hazelwood in Victoria.

The real crunch will come when Eraring goes in just two years, given that it’s 25 per cent of NSW power supply.

So, we won’t just face further cost pressures; there’ll also be the intermittency issue – or potential major blackouts – because nothing like the required firming will be in place.

Extinction Rebellion protesters caused peak hour traffic chaos on Melbourne’s West Gate Freeway last Tuesday. Picture: 9 News

Last week, parts of Melbourne faced traffic gridlock because of Extinction Rebellion protesters demanding an even faster phase-out of all fossil fuels.

With wall-to-wall green-left Labor governments on the mainland, no one is going to explain to the public why the pace of the current shift to renewables is disastrous.

Yet the truth is that we’re facing a future of higher power prices, electricity rationing if not actual outages, and the loss of what’s left of our manufacturing industry to countries that aren’t so precious about emissions, like China.

As one of my guests on Sky News said this week, Australia’s power conundrum is akin to the Saudis paying sky-high prices for sand or the Eskimos paying through the nose for ice, given the abundance of coal and gas here that we’re increasingly too emissions-obsessive to use domestically.

There’s really only one word for this – insanity – yet it’s an insanity that’s likely to continue until such time as the lights start to go out because only bitter experience will defeat the weight of green propaganda and Labor MPs who now put the woke ahead of working people.

JUDGE’S OUTBURST POINTER TO HOW DIVISIVE DEBATE WILL BECOME

The Voice debate is turning ugly because its supporters are accusing everyone who disagrees with them of racism.

Sometimes, it’s thinly disguised, like the Prime Minister’s statement last week that Peter Dutton was “unworthy” of his job for urging a “no” vote.

Other times, it’s blatant bullying, like Noel Pearson’s recent statement that Mick Gooda (an Aboriginal man and Voice supporter) was a “bedwetter” for wanting the Voice amendment watered down; or Pearson’s earlier accusation that Senator Jacinta Price was stuck in a “redneck celebrity vortex” and “punching down on black fellas” because she dared to contradict him.

Noel Pearson.

Mick Gooda.

Last week, a sitting NSW Supreme Court judge accused National Party frontbencher Pat Conaghan of being “disgusting, paternalistic and racist” because the MP said that indigenous people’s wellbeing could be advanced “without unintentionally encouraging Australians to have conversations that contain the words ‘us’ and ‘them’ in place of ‘one’ and ‘all’”. Conaghan told parliament that the Voice proposal “conflates two entirely separate issues: firstly, recognising Aboriginal … people in the Australian constitution – a point upon which we all agree and that does not have unforeseen consequences; and secondly, support for a constitutionally entrenched (indigenous) advisory body, a point that is a cause of concern for many”.

Justice Ian Harrison and Federal Member for Cowper Pat Conaghan.

For his troubles, Justice Ian Harrison fired back an email to the former policeman and solicitor stating that “you obviously do not understand … the depths of paternalism and racism that ooze from your words”.

“What is so subtly disgusting” he went on, “about your contention, is that it promotes the counterfeit spectre of harm to the Australian community, while ignoring the immense and patently harmless symbolic benefit that recognition of the Voice will give to a long-neglected section of our society”.

On this issue, I reckon the former country cop from Kempsey knows more than the judge in his ivory tower.

What’s more, the learned judge doesn’t seem aware of the statements from such eminent former judges as Ian Callinan, Terry Cole and David Jackson, to the effect that the Voice will divide us by race and gum-up government.

What is clear from this vitriolic response to a perfectly reasonable speech, is just how heated this debate will become over something that should unite us as a nation, not divide us; all because the Prime Minister has gone beyond recognition to insert what amounts to an activist power grab into our constitution.

It’s making a lot of “quiet Australians” more inclined to vote “no” because they’re sick of being talked down to and patronised by people who should know better, like this judge.

Watch Peta on Credlin on Sky News, weeknights at 6pm